Photo Collage Maker

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Editors' Review

If you're looking for an easy-to-use digital scrapbook, Photo Collage Maker may be for you. You can use it to create attractive photo collages for your PC, e-mail, or Web site, too, and print out your creations as actual scrapbooks with ease. It comes with a wide range of backgrounds, clip art, borders, and effects that make it easy to put images of different sizes and even formats together.

Its clean, attractive interface keeps things simple. Simplicity is the program's biggest advantage, since most new PCs already come with at least one image-editing tool, often a "lite" version of a powerful program like Photoshop. But it can take longer to learn to use such extensive and complex tools than it does to actually complete a project with Photo Collage Maker. It collects all the features, frames, borders, enhancements, and effects you need in one place, without overwhelming you with options and settings.

Using Photo Collage Maker is easy: you simply choose your background, colors, clip art, and other aspects of composition, browse to your image files, and add your selections. We'd like to see the ability to add multiple files at once, since it can be awkward to scroll back through the folder. Some of the effects are a bit difficult to use; for instance, the perspective tool has a button to apply the effect but not one to undo it. Photo Collage Maker downloads as a ZIP file; the 30-use trial version lacks the ability to print collages and download new clip art.

All things done with drag-n-drop; basic and fancy tools for editing images; layer tools that even a kid can use; customizable templates - resize or replace any single element as you like.

Cons

Photo fix tools hard to find at first - eventually found them in Filters inside Frames and Effects.

Summary

I've been using the Collage Maker for a few weeks now - stumbled upon their demo on YouTube and got excited about trying a project with my own pictures. The program is really user-friendly, no matter if I use template pages, or start from scratch. Scrapbookers who are used to traditional ways will hardly feel the difference, except for the cost. You just pick your pictures, and play around, move the pics and clipart, change the frames, try different colors, until it's perfect. That would last long and cost a lot with traditional scrap supplies. So, if you were wary of digiscrapping, thinking you need to be good with computers to do it, the Collage Maker will make you change your mind.

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